EVENTS

Floating in a Sea of Propaganda – part 3

One of the worst things about Russians (especially Soviet Russians!) is that they use propaganda to indoctrinate their people into the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Those are ringing words, aren’t they? “Dictatorship of the proletariat” sounds almost like something Orwell would have come up with. That’s because it was cooked up by the US’ own propaganda department.

It’s pretty amazing, the things you can find on Ebay. That pamphlet was “Prepared and released by the Committee on Un-American Activities, U.S. House of Representatives” – HUAC – Joe McCarthy’s boys. McCarthy, if you’ll recall, used to claim that he had a list of “over 200 members of the Department of State that are known communists.” The list was, naturally, a lie. McCarthy was a propagandist. He used the US Government to push his lies to the people, thereby deliberately bypassing any sort of democratic process in which The People would be able to assess the truth of what was being said, and to decide how to respond.

The contents of the pamphlet are an interesting exercise in moral nihilism: the worst and most bald-faced lies are told with a straight face. Clearly, whoever published the pamphlet believed that the ends justified the means – i.e.: it was worth lying to the people to protect them from the lies of communism. Or something. That’s why I call it ‘moral nihilism’ – there is no underlying reason why we should believe one set of lies or another.

How do the Communists get control?

Legally or illegally, any way they can. Communism’s first big victory was through bloody revolution. Every one since has been by military conquest. or internal corruption, or the thread of these.

Conspiracy is the basic method of Communism in countries it is trying to capture.Iron Force is the basic method of communism in countries it has already captured.

I am reminded of the old joke: a Soviet farmer says to another, “You know, under Capitalism, man exploits man. Under Communism, it’s just the opposite.”

Conspiracy and iron force are how all governments create themselves; they call it “legitimacy” and once they are established they call it “the social contract.”

This is a great load of lies. 17 pages of them, and then Appendix A, which is a list of the “Principal officers and offices of the Communist Party, USA as of 1947.”

This is a great load of lies for good. These lies are to save America from a fate worse than death: having to admit that its ideals of democracy are also lies.

7. Could I change my job?No, you would work where you are told, at what you are told, for wages fixed by the Government.

Because in the US, the Government would never get involved in setting a minimum wage, and would never fight tooth and nail to protect corporate interests by preventing that minimum wage from going up or down as necessary to reflect the needs of the people. In the US, the Government would never send the National Guard to break laborer’s strikes and defend the interests of industrialists, in order to prevent laborers from negotiating from any kind of position of power. Under Communism, man exploits man.

8. Could I go to school?You could go to the kind of school the Communists tell you to, AND NOWHERE ELSE. You could go as long as they let you AND NO LONGER.

And you certainly could go to any public school that was open to people of your skin color, and you would definitely not find that the ruling class’ schools were nicer and afforded better opportunities if you could pay for them. Those nasty Communists are going to tell you what school to go to, just like we will!

I will not force-march you through these pages of lies, but you get the idea: propaganda is bi-directional. When someone starts telling you to beware of propaganda – it’s probably propaganda. What fascinates me about this stuff is that you could run through it and re-target it to make the same assertions about pretty much anyone, and it wouldn’t require any editing beyond changing the names. That’s one valuable technique for detecting lies: if you can take a bunch of assertions and re-target them and the value of their argument doesn’t change, then it’s probably not tied to much in the way of fact.

Here’s a trick that should be immediately recognizable by any fan of bad argument: well-poisoning:

If they call me a liar, it’s probably “fake news.” If they make such-and-such an argument it’s “boring” or “tedious.”

68. What is their favorite escape when challenged on a point of fact?To accuse you of “dragging in a red herring,” a distortion of an old folk saying that originally described the way to throw hounds off the track of a hot trail.

And:

69. What is the difference in fact between a Communist and a Fascist?None worth noticing.

Well, then, how am I supposed to tell you all apart? Communists, fascists, capitalists, oligarchists, and pseudo-democrats look a whole lot alike to me. Should I just support the one that’s wearing red?

#70, which I cut off in the photo, is a pretty good one, too: How do Communists get control of organizations in which the majority are not Communists? They work. They come early and stay late. They know how to run a meeting. They demand the floor. Wow, who wants people like that in their organization?! Not me!

Remember, this pamphlet was written by the same imperialist faction that has suppressed democratic governments around the world – overtly and covertly, with money and marines, with CIA and Starbucks. They’re telling you to be afraid of communists doing the same thing to you that they’ve done, because we’re the good guys and they’re not. I recall when I was a kid during the Vietnam War and first heard of the “Domino Theory” and asked why we didn’t just see if people voted to become communists. Well, that’s unacceptable! Communism (as the pamphlet tells us) only comes after bloody overthrow. It doesn’t seem to enter into the equation that the only way to get a capitalist pseudo-democracy to unclench its tick-like feeding mouth-parts from the body politic is to grab it behind the head with tweezers and twist and squeeze.

There were some embarrassing things said by Communists around the time of the depression. It made sense, in fact – we had just seen a bloody shambles of millions of wasted lives because oligarchs could not non-violently re-align after the industrial revolution. The easiest way for them to sort out a new political order was for their over-bred dingbat elite to have a great auto da fe in Flanders and Brusilov. Negotiation would have taken effort. The disaffection resulting from World War I manifested itself among many intellectuals as a re-assessment of Socialism (Einstein) and political philosophers like Rawls exploring the idea of a fair society. Philosopher of education John Dewey, who had done a great deal to modernize American education, was demonized and dismissed for being Communistic, and philosophers like Bertrand Russell had to publicly disclaim their support. In other words, propaganda campaigns like this one, worked.

When I say that the propaganda campaign worked what I mean is that it obviated the need to actually do anything to make capitalism/oligarchism look better. After all, if capitalism really was so flippin’ fantastic for industrial workers, they’d be cheering wildly as they went to work, not striking for better pay and safer working conditions. Seems obvious, right? Maybe all this propaganda is, you know, a red herring – a way to throw hounds off a hot trail.

When we start to look at the sea of propaganda around us, dealing with it is obviously not possible. It is, I think, the salient attribute of the political cultures in which we live. That’s why I have great sympathy for the post-modernists, who try to teach us that our perceptions of practically everything are not objective, and are culturally constructed. From that angle, I see post-modernism as a rational response to propaganda: reject it and see it for what it is, then try to move on. I hate the awareness that marketing, public relations, and propaganda do more to form our reality than just about anything else, which is why I desperately seek for reality in small, experimental, tangible things – things that are small enough that the marketers have not yet decided how to “influence” or “monetize” them. Yet.

What fascinates me about this stuff is that you could run through it and re-target it to make the same assertions about pretty much anyone, and it wouldn’t require any editing beyond changing the names.

I am reminded that “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was (partially) a rewrite of “Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu” (which, sez WikiP, was itself plagiarized from a novel)

Owlmirror@#2:
I did not know that! That’s remarkable! (One thing propaganda teaches me is that propagandists are generally not very good writers. The good ones work for marketing departments for Disney, selling Star Wars stuff)

I feel like I should have mentioned on that point about education: it’s not as though capitalists won’t control your education. They’ll even figure out how to put you in debt-servitude in return for a decent education. Damn those communists!

In one sense none of this is new. The ancients knew full well that those who sought to sway public policy to their own ends would use appeals suited to whoever held the reins of power – whether it be a sycophant whispering into the ear of the King or a demagogue leading a public assembly astray with his rhetoric. Propaganda is simply the most appropriate form of rhetoric for a modern media-savvy audience in the sort of nominal democracy we have. Aristotle wrote his treatise on rhetoric in part to equip students with an understanding of how the tricks were done, so they could tell when they were being had by a con-man or led astray by someone who could speak well but did not understand the facts. Indeed, the pernicious effects of bad-faith argument were such common knowledge in the Athens of Aristotle’s day that lampooning them was a staple of Aristophanes’ oeuvre.

The novelty, I think, is the degree of entrenched institutional identity that the propaganda is now serving. In Aristotle’s day there weren’t organised political parties, just temporary alliances centred round issues or personalities. Aristotle envisioned the greatest threat to the public good in a Democratic society to be someone who could use his education and skill at speaking to convince others that he was right. What he didn’t conceive of was the degree of control over information that exists in a modern media society – you don’t need clever rhetoric anymore, you just need mass dispersal of your viewpoint such that it becomes a seldom-questioned orthodoxy. Very little in modern propaganda is about clever arguments that try to persuade – mostly it’s about blatant misrepresentation that relies on a public unwillingness to delve too deeply or analyse too critically.

That and the gradual farming out of important decisions (particularly economic decisions) from democratic to non-democratic institutions (corporations, central banks, international finance organisations). The reason the quality of political rhetoric has declined in recent centuries is that there is much less need to persuade people when the people (and their representatives) are not the ones making the decisions. You just have to propagandise instead, in order to make it seem like the people are making the decisions.

Marcus, that item of propaganda is very interesting. It would be even more interesting to find a Communist block counterpart from the same period — I’m sure they exist, even if not necessarily in that form. A textbook for a Political Science high school class might include some capitalism bashing in the same vein. I was a couple of months into my second year of high school when the regime changed, so I missed the opportunity to study Scientific Socialism and the like (they kept the teacher, but she taught Philosophy, Logic and non-communist Political Economy instead — about as well as you’d imagine. She made a mockery of logic, in particular. Don’t imagine she used to teach Marx any better).

“Dictatorship of the proletariat” sounds almost like something Orwell would have come up with. That’s because it was cooked up by the US’ own propaganda department.

The “dictatorship of the proletariat” is an extremely inaccurate label. It is supposed to refer to a state in which the proletariat, or the working class, has control of political power. This was never the case for communist states. There a handful of high-ranking party members had all the political power. Working class had no influence in politics. Unlike in our fake democracies/oligarchies, there workers couldn’t even elect the politicians.

7. Could I change my job?
No, you would work where you are told, at what you are told, for wages fixed by the Government.

It seems like people who wrote this weren’t concerned about making their lies at least seem believable. For example, this one is just so stupid that it’s plain ridiculous. Of course, people in Soviet Union could choose their careers. When applying for a university, they weren’t just assigned study programs based on some weird random government lottery. And of course they could choose and change jobs.

@ Ieva SkrebeleIt seems like people who wrote this weren’t concerned about making their lies at least seem believable.

This was the level of propaganda Western nations cranked out. My guess is that it would have been quite successful since in those days people did not expect their government to lie to them. My impression is that the USA had a very small number of immigrants from the nationalities that made up the USSR so there would be few Americans who knew from personal experience or from relations in the USSR that these were lies.

Marcus’s example is particularly crass but the stories about “studying what you were told” and “being assigned a job” were told as true in the 1950’s and 1960’s. I remember seeing such stories (Readers’ Digest was a mass of propaganda and outright lies mixed with real stories) when I was very young. Oh, the People’s Republic of China was worse, though I don’t see how it could have been.

I don’t think I actually believed these stories but I did not actively disbelieve them either. Of course, I was not in the USA so I missed most of the real brainwashing.

There was no evil the USSR was not capable of or nefarious tricks they would not use to destroy the USA. Soviet agents were cunning and they were everywhere.

This was without mentioning some of the real horrors such as the Ukrainian famines or even the Gulag. The US propagandists probably did not know any about the real USSR.

If I remember correctly, the Gulag really got little or no press until One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Один день Ивана Денисовича) was published in the West in the 1960s

You could choose what you studied, if you passed the exams. If not, you were faced with very limited choices.

After you finished school (and the mandatory stint in the army for men), you got assigned to a job, basically. If you had good marks and/or had the right connections, you got to work in the city of your choice, or at least in a city. If not, you took the posting they gave you. This was particularly true for doctors and teachers, but other occupations had limited choices too. Nobody was involuntarily unemployed, but felons and political cases could be demoted to remote locations or menial jobs, with no alternative.

You could request to be transferred, but it was particularly difficult to move into the more desirable cities. Housing was scarce (but very affordable) and assigned through your work, using a waiting list based on seniority, marital status, number of children, party membership (a yes/no question, not multiple-choice, obviously) and other factors. This list was amenable to corruption and nepotism to some extent, especially in the choice of location, quality and size of the dwelling (almost always an apartment). A childless couple could wait a decade or more, and would live with their parents in the meantime. Cars were bought the same way, except that list was corrupt as hell (you could bribe your way to the top for a sum comparable to the cost of the car).

So I would say you could study what you wanted — if you got in, a big if — but you could seldom choose where to work.

Correction: people waiting for an apartment would live with their parents if possible, but their jobs would often be in other towns, or their families could be too large for the typical 1-bedroom and 2-bedroom apartments (3-bedroom apartments existed but were rare and a bit of a status symbol). So many young people lived in dorms — in common rooms if unmarried, or in two-person rooms if married, although seldom with their own bathroom (there was no allowance for unmarried couples).

Tabby Lavalamp@#7:Did any of the Americans involved in writing this even blink at the irony?

They were probably already ideologized into a stupor.

I do not understand how people are able to so completely embrace ideology. For example, J. Edgar Hoover appears to have genuinely been completely batshit about communism and communist subversion – in spite of the fact that he was actually suppressing labor and serving industrialists and racists. Everything I have read about the man makes it sound like he was a “true believer” – i.e.: he completely accepted what he was told about how bad communists and communist subversion was. He seemed to have the mind of a conspiracy theorist: he re-contextualized everything in terms of his fixed ideology. Apparently he was pretty certain that Martin Luther King, Jr., was a communist agitator. He appears to have failed completely at critical thinking.

I’ve encountered other committed ideologues, and I find them bizzare to talk to. One of them in particular is well-educated, intelligent, and completely incapable of seeing things from anything other than his particular tribal identity’s perspective.

To me, it makes as much sense as nationalism, or racism, or being a sports fan.

jrkrideau@#11:My guess is that it would have been quite successful since in those days people did not expect their government to lie to them.

I am not so sure about that. It doesn’t make sense; they had just survived WWI and a massive economic collapse, labor unrest, and being treated as cannon-fodder. How can anyone not see that most governments run on lies, and the US government particularly?

I remember seeing such stories (Readers’ Digest was a mass of propaganda and outright lies mixed with real stories) when I was very young.

My grandparents had great stacks of Readers’ Digest, and National Geographic, and I used to read the Geographic with great enthusiasm. I don’t remember the Digest being a pile of propaganda but that’s probably because I didn’t read it that much.

cartomancer@#5:In one sense none of this is new. The ancients knew full well that those who sought to sway public policy to their own ends would use appeals suited to whoever held the reins of power – whether it be a sycophant whispering into the ear of the King or a demagogue leading a public assembly astray with his rhetoric. Propaganda is simply the most appropriate form of rhetoric for a modern media-savvy audience in the sort of nominal democracy we have.

Yes, I think you’re right. Political lies are a natural byproduct of politician’s ruthlessness and unconcern with the truth.
I hadn’t really thought of it as a form of rhetoric (I think of it as just another form of lying) In the sense that “rhetoric” may mean clever speech intended to manipulate or impress, I suppose that’s true. Though I believe that there is an idea of rhetoric that is not entirely lies – whereas I see all propaganda as lies since it attempts to convince by bending the truth.

Indeed, the pernicious effects of bad-faith argument were such common knowledge in the Athens of Aristotle’s day that lampooning them was a staple of Aristophanes’ oeuvre.

Yay for Aristophanes!

Voltaire did some mighty work in that area, too. As did Mark Twain. Who’s in that role nowadays? Jimmy Kimmel?

Aristotle envisioned the greatest threat to the public good in a Democratic society to be someone who could use his education and skill at speaking to convince others that he was right. What he didn’t conceive of was the degree of control over information that exists in a modern media society – you don’t need clever rhetoric anymore, you just need mass dispersal of your viewpoint such that it becomes a seldom-questioned orthodoxy.

Yes. Edward Bernays appears to have been right. And maybe Aristotle was an optimist.

(I just want to my happy spot imagining an encounter between Diogenes the Cynic and Donald Trump)

Very little in modern propaganda is about clever arguments that try to persuade – mostly it’s about blatant misrepresentation that relies on a public unwillingness to delve too deeply or analyse too critically.

Which feeds right back on itself. The more people are trained to accept statements uncritically, the easier they are too fool with new statements. The way that today’s media ‘influencers’ are followed really scares me. For that matter, Jimmy Kimmel is now a credible political commentator. I compare that with Howard Cosell and the various talking heads of the 60s, who we now know were in the establishment’s back pocket – they were part of the propaganda machine.

The reason the quality of political rhetoric has declined in recent centuries is that there is much less need to persuade people when the people (and their representatives) are not the ones making the decisions. You just have to propagandise instead, in order to make it seem like the people are making the decisions.

I have stopped after the first paragraph to comment.
“Dictatorship of the Proletariat” was used by communists by themselves and it was seen as the the best way to govern. I have heard that phrase enough times in the school to be pretty sure of this.

I am sure the pamphlet exagerates and i a piece of propaganda, but these photos do not show me exagerations that are to far blown out of proportion as to be completely untrue. The wages were fixed by government and mobility was restricted. Many people were assigned jobs – and residence places – with no option to choose.

Yeah, that one stuck out to me as well. I wasn’t as sure as you, but a little googling turns up references to the phrase in the writings of both Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

About it being the best way to govern, though: AFAICT, it was originally perceived as a stopgap measure to ensure that the transition from capitalism to communism would happen the way it should (never mind that communism was also considered the inevitable end-state of history). But then, power did what power does, and the people who had entrusted themselves with leading the transition discovered that being in charge was ever so much more fun.

All wages were set by the state for each job, and they were public knowledge. More precisely, each job had a level on a payscale, which gave a base wage; and there were formulas to adjust that for things like education level and time on the job. There was no negotiation.

The habit of publicly known wages continued long after the end of the communist regime. “How much do you make?” is still polite conversation among newly acquainted people, much like talk about weather in England.

konrad_arflane@#20: I am under no illusion that power was ever ideologically pure of heart and perceived itself as a necessary transition phase, even at the very beginning. That’s just propaganda. The top was corrupted from the get-go, and, once they took over, that spread quickly to any parts of the organization that may still have been idealistic and honest.

You could choose what you studied, if you passed the exams. If not, you were faced with very limited choices.

How is this different from anywhere else? For example, here in the UK, the universities all publish detailed lists of exactly what prerequisites are required for each course (both subjects and grades achieved) before you can even apply – but having the prerequisites is no guarantee that you’ll get a place on the course of your choosing. Competition for particular subjects or institutions can be fierce, so even people who passed all the necessary exams can still end up facing fairly limited choices. And if you don’t pass the exams, a lot of people end up with no choice at all: unemployment, on very minimal benefits (i.e. not enough to live on independently).

UPDATE “Philip Cross” has not had one single day off from editing Wikipedia in almost five years. “He” has edited every single day from 29 August 2013 to 14 May 2018. Including five Christmas Days. That’s 1,721 consecutive days of editing.

133,612 edits to Wikpedia have been made in the name of “Philip Cross” over 14 years. That’s over 30 edits per day, seven days a week. And I do not use that figuratively: Wikipedia edits are timed, and if you plot them, the timecard for “Philip Cross’s” Wikipedia activity is astonishing is astonishing [sic] if it is one individual:

[image]

The operation runs like clockwork, seven days a week, every waking hour, without significant variation.

I’m assuming that since the HUAC was established by Congress, that it’s “US Government propaganda.” When I first started reading that pamphlet all I could think was “this is really bad? did GPO actually print this garbage?”

@ 16 Marcus I am not so sure about that. It doesn’t make sense; they had just survived WWI and a massive economic collapse, labor unrest, and being treated as cannon-fodder. How can anyone not see that most governments run on lies, and the US government particularly?

Well, I am just going by my own experiences (Canada) and comments by US friends and relations but, overall, I don’t think people in the English-speaking world really expected lies from “their” gov’ts. Of course the Nazis and those evil Commies lied but not Roosevelt or Eisenhower! No US president would lie to the American people about international affairs.

Up until the Vietnam War got nasty in the USA there was not a lot of distrust of gov’t pronouncements in this area. Even after that, there was an incedible level of trust in gov’t propaganda.

If we look at the build-up of propaganda leading to the Iraq invasion, we still see the same thing among the mass media and a lot of people in the USA. People believed the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powers when about 99% of the rest of the world were shaking their heads in disbelief.

To show just how far the propaganda went here are a couple of pieces on Yousef Karsh, the Canadian portrait photographer and his contrabution to the Red Scare.

I have only seen one of the photos but it was up to Karsh’s high standards — really scary. There must be some of these on the internet but my poor googling skills cannot find them.

Dunc@#22:
I know what you’re saying, but it’s a bit different. Back then, our school was divided like this, starting at age 6: years 1-4 (“primary school”, one teacher per class for all subjects); years 5-8 (“gymnasium”, a teacher for each subject); years 9-10 and 11-12 (high school, first and second stage; or vocational school); university (4-5 years undergraduate, resulting in a degree equivalent to a BA; then graduate school, same as everywhere).

Years 1-10 were compulsory. 1-8 were, in theory, the same at every school; then you applied at a high school of your choice and took an admission exam (age about 14). If you passed, fine, although there was a second exam two years later. If not, but your result was not terrible, they assigned you to whatever high school and specialty had vacancies. You would then study forestry or agricultural technology or whatever. If your result was worse, you got vocational school, with things like lathe operator and bus driver being the nicer options (depending on where you lived, miner and steelworker were ever unpopular and very unhealthy possibilities, health and safety being criminally negligent).

University was half-decent, and all but guaranteed a reasonable job (but it could be at the other end of the country, if your GPA was not as good).

In short, I would say there was much more job security, but also much more coercion. You did not get to refuse the job you were assigned to (although if you did very well in school and/or had the right connections, you got to pick). Note that your employer had no say at all in all of this.

@ 16 MarcusI don’t remember the Digest being a pile of propaganda but that’s probably because I didn’t read it that much.

It was not blatant but there would be stories about people tunnelling out under the Berlin Wall or extolling the courage of Gary Powers (of U2–not the band–fame) or contrasting the freedoms in the USA vs the Soviet Union. Nothing blatantly propaganda but often heavily slanted even when the basic facts might have been quite true.

Re Hoover
He was the template for Alex Jones.

And he was not shy in having the FBI take credit for things.

I remember reading an article “by” him in the Reader’s Digest, probably in the early 1960’s. It described how the FBI detected the presence of microdots that were being used to communicate between Germany and German agents in the USA. IIRC it was quite impressive and showed what outstanding work the FBI did on WWII.

To my surprise. while reading the memoirs of a British double agent codenamed Tricycle in the 1970’s or 80’s I discovered that Tricycle had personally brought the secret of the microdots with him from British Intelligence to the FBI.

jrkrideau@#2: Up until the Vietnam War got nasty in the USA there was not a lot of distrust of gov’t pronouncements in this area. Even after that, there was an incedible level of trust in gov’t propaganda.

If we look at the build-up of propaganda leading to the Iraq invasion, we still see the same thing among the mass media and a lot of people in the USA. People believed the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powers when about 99% of the rest of the world were shaking their heads in disbelief.

OK, yes, that’s true.

I was just reading Mohamed El-Baradei’s book about his time during the Iraq wars (and elsewhere) – he’s quite an interesting character. And, as you probably already knew, he and Hans Blix (to a lesser degree Blix) were standing around with their skulls ready to burst with frustration, while they were trying to explain to the Bush gang that they knew a tremendous amount about Iraq’s nuclear program (most specifically, that there was absolutely no sign of activity) while Bush was running around talking about the ever-present threat.

Dunc@#22: For example, here in the UK, the universities all publish detailed lists of exactly what prerequisites are required for each course (both subjects and grades achieved) before you can even apply – but having the prerequisites is no guarantee that you’ll get a place on the course of your choosing.

Here in the US, if you’re applying for an ivy league school, the admission committee takes into account whether your parents attended, or were donors. Because, you know, being a historian is hereditary.

Mohamed El-Baradei … and Hans Blix (to a lesser degree Blix) were standing around with their skulls ready to burst with frustration, while they were trying to explain to the Bush gang

The US regime, at the time, did not want to hear. They wanted war.

Scott Ritter, the ex-US Marine and Chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq,after he resigned in frustration with US interference, spent his time telling anyone who would listen that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. Did he get any airtime or press coverage in the USA?

jrkrideau@#34:Scott Ritter, the ex-US Marine and Chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq,after he resigned in frustration with US interference, spent his time telling anyone who would listen that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. Did he get any airtime or press coverage in the USA?